Suppose that the swift Achilles is having a race with a tortoise. Since the tortoise is much slower, she gets a head start. When the tortoise has reached a given point a, Achilles starts. But by the time Achilles reaches a, the tortoise has already moved beyond point a, to point b. And by the time Achilles reaches b the tortoise has already moved a little bit farther along, to point c. Since this process goes on indefinitely, Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise.

How can this be?

Taken from - http://members.aol.com/kiekeben/zeno.html

ok so achilles goes faster than the totoise so lets put this into math let just say achilles goes at a rate of, for simplcity, 2 mps (meters per second) and the tortiose goes at a rate of, again for simplicity 1 mps so lets say point a is 10 meters when the tortiose reaches that  achilles starts so the distance the toriose traveled in the nex second is 1m putting him at 11m while achilles reached the 2 m mark after 9 seconds achilles is at the 18m mark and the tortiose is at the 19 m mark and after one more second achilles catches the tortiose at the 20m mark, so the distance between them becomes shorter and shorter until the distance traveled by the tortiose in x amount of time plus his lead is equal to the distance gained by achilles in x amount of time.

Posted by CJ on 2005-06-17 02:10:18